


Everybody Wants To Rule The World

by le_chat_vilain



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Season 3 Spoilers, that awkward moment when you run into your ex on the high seas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 17:25:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5057329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/le_chat_vilain/pseuds/le_chat_vilain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vane sees a ghost while Eleanor’s guilt makes a resurgence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Wants To Rule The World

**Author's Note:**

> Slight spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the season 3 trailer yet. This one’s just a drabble because I’m hella tired but really wanted to write a little something for this particular moment. Thatch is of course Blackbeard, I know he was rumoured to have a few different names but I like Thatch the best so I’m just going with that one - might also go as Teach I'm not sure which they'll be using on the show yet. Once again, I haven’t proofed it or anything like that, but I’ll get around to it - eventually.
> 
> Musical inspiration and title: Everybody Wants To Rule The World - Lorde.

A chill runs down his spine and seizes his soul when he looks through the spyglass at the ship across the distance. Ringing starts in his ears, a swirling vortex of rage, longing, and dread winding in his stomach; a viper woken from it’s winter slumber.

He thought she was dead. They all thought she was dead.

He looks away, convinces himself he’s hallucinating. That he’s gone too long without a drink and it’s simply a trick of the mind or a striking resemblance.

A striking resemblance to the love of his life, the one who left him for the wolves only to be thrown to a different pack of them herself days later.

A woman who looked exactly like Eleanor Guthrie aboard a ship of the King’s navy, a ship belonging to the very wolves who were said to have devoured her.

He raises it again and looks a second time, confirming that which he knew to be true but he was so reluctant to accept: she was alive, and somehow she was fucking him over again.

***

Of all the pirates on all the ships on all the wretched bloody ocean, it had to be him. Of all the people in this life that she’d wronged, it had to be the one she’d wronged the most.

The guilt swirls in her gut, twisting and writhing, threatening to tear her apart. It had been one thing to know she was betraying him again, when it had been so long since they had last seen each other, when the last she’d heard from him was in a letter pinned to her father’s corpse. It had been one thing when he existed in the abstract, a force across the sea, out of sight and just another piece on the chess board.

But to be this close again, to see him in the flesh again – even across the waves like this – it tore open the scars, rendering fresh wounds of old ones and salting them in the cruelest way; the way one can only torture oneself.

She lowers the spyglass slowly, heartbeat pounding in her ears, hands shaking as apprehension takes a hold of her. There was only one man in this world whom she rightfully feared, a fear born of knowing someone so completely that it could not be questioned, shaken, or overcome.

And there he stood, Charles Vane, as she lived and breathed.

***

He folds the spyglass and presses it to Thatch’s chest, stalking off to his quarters before anyone can begin to make assumptions, or worse: accusations. Before the rumour mill winds up and his loyalties are questioned. Before Blackbeard gets wind of how Captain Vane loved the Guthrie woman, in the most painful and brutal way.

He tries to let the anger win, let it surge to the surface and govern his actions, but the undertow of relief is simply too strong.

After all she’s put him through, after all she’s put them all through, after all the ways they’ve hurt each other, he still can’t find the strength to truly hate her; how much easier it would be if he could. He had grieved for her in his own way, gone through withdrawal of her like never before, and it had all been for naught. All of that pain, all of that drink, all of those tears shed in secret in the wee hours of the morning in the darkest corners of that fort, and yet still he couldn’t hate her.

War was on their shores and she stood there by the enemy’s side, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that was the side she’d truly been on the entire time, if she’d always been his enemy. Either way, he keeps circling back to that same thought, the one that gives him the whisper of the high that only she can grant him. The thought that rouses and feeds the addiction he thought he’d defeated:

_Thank God, she’s alive._

Captain Vane still loves the Guthrie woman.


End file.
